Despite our successful late-night snake-hunting and rolling sleep deficit, we had an early and full day planned.  Rolling out of the sack around seven o'clock, we made a quick breakfast and shouldered our camera bags and knapsacks for an early morning hike into the canyon near our campsite.  Emptying into the much larger Seminole Canyon after a mile or so, this much smaller canyon started off as a shallow draw that gradually grew deeper as it dropped down towards the main canyon.

The charcoal grey surface rock was hard and pockmarked, and looked to me like a layer of volcanic rock, like an old lava flow.  In some places where the lower layers of softer limestone were exposed, they were oftentimes eroded away, leaving an overhang of the harder "cap rock".  Large pieces of flat rock and boulders were scattered about everywhere, providing plenty of hiding places for small creatures.  Flowers, cacti, and other plants took hold in cracks and crevices in the hard surface rock, while others found purchase in the thin patches of soil on the canyon floor.  Here and there were small pools of water, remnants of some earlier rainfall.

Hiking here two years ago, we had discovered a Sonoran Ground Snake (Sonora episcopa) and a Texas Banded Gecko (Coleonyx brevis), so we had high hopes of finding some old friends, and maybe some new species.  The canyon provided much in the way of ledges and crevices, which we checked carefully in hopes of finding a Rock Rattler or perhaps another Blacktail.

We felt it was important to get an early start before the sun heated up the rock faces, and drove any snakes back underground.  As the canyon deepened, we split up, Ken and I working the canyon floor, while Rick and Steve checked the rim and upper ledges.  The canyon floor proved to be rough going, our passage obstructed by hundreds of large boulders and the low-growing mesquite trees in between them. I'm just over six feet, and Ken is well over, and so we had a difficult time in places, duck-walking under the prickly mesquite.

Here and there an Emory Oak grew tall enough to throw some welcome shade, now that the sun was high enough to throw down some heat.  A pair of Cactus Wrens apparently had a nest in one of the oaks.  This bird's nest is a large bulky cylinder of grass, which we couldn't locate, but we must have been close judging from the bird's incessant chattering and flitting back and forth and up and down the canyon sides, attempting to distract us.  There were plenty of cracks and crevices and ledges to check for Rock Rattlers and the like.

It always amazes me when the smallest hole or crevice in the rock is enough for plant life to take hold.  Throughout the canyon we came across small clumps of brightly colored phlox and penstemon, eking out an existence on small amounts of soil and water.

By the end of the canyon we had seen no herps other than a few inaccessible lizards, and now the sun was climbing high in the sky, heating up the canyon walls on both sides.  We climbed out of the canyon and took five on the rim, watching the Cactus Wrens and butterflies, before heading back to camp.  One upturned stone revealed a fair sized Centuroides scorpion, which we paused to photograph, and we managed to scare up another Tree Lizard and a few Merriam's Canyon Lizards, our friends of old.  I watched an Agave beetle crawled up and down each stalk of a Spanish Bayonet; much like us, searching for something.